Harmonic control of a dual-valve hydraulic servo system with dynamically allocated flows

Modern industries face increasing demands to improve the precision and workability of equipment, leading to stringent requirements for hydraulic servo systems in terms of flow, accuracy, and output power. High-flow servo valves and multi-valve synchronous control methods have seen more applications in the industry to meet these demands. However, high-flow servo valves are expensive and have unsatisfactory performance, and synchronous control methods require servo valves to have the same hydraulic characteristics, resulting in higher cost and lower accuracy of high-flow hydraulic servo systems. Also, very little has been conducted on controlling single actuators using multiple valves. In this study, we design a novel dual-valve hydraulic servo system structure with a high-flow proportional directional valve that is connected in parallel with a low-flow servo valve and further develop the mathematical model of this dual-valve system. Next, a harmonic control scheme was proposed, which included a flow allocation layer and trajectory tracking layer. Thereby, we achieved optimal control of two valves, and robust performance was guaranteed. Finally, we investigate the relationships between the flows of two valves, the deadband of the proportional directional valve, and trajectory tracking errors. Experimental results show that the proposed control scheme can effectively adjust the output flow of each valve dynamically according to the tracking trajectory and the hydraulic characteristics of the two valves, and the tracking performance of the servo system is significantly improved. This method is promised to enable the realization of an economical, high-flow, high-precision hydraulic servo system that can be generally used in various fields, such as marine engineering and construction.     

Model-based robust control design and experimental validation of collaborative industrial robot system with uncertainty

Based on the traditional PID control and robust control algorithm, a novel practical robust control method is designed for the 6-DOF collaborative industrial robot with uncertainty. The proposed algorithm consists of a robust term and a model-based PD control term, which we call MPDP controller. It is demonstrated by Lyapunov theoretical analysis that the algorithm is able to guarantee uniform boundedness and uniform ultimate boundedness of the system. Simulations and experiments show the good performance of MPDP control in a robot with smaller steady-state tracking errors and better robustness compared to PID controllers.     

Stability analysis for linear time-varying systems using bicoprime factorization

This paper presents a bicoprime factorization (BCF) approach to deal with various stability problems for linear discrete time-varying (LTV) systems within the framework of nest algebra. Based on the bicoprime factorization, we give necessary and sufficient conditions for (strongly) simultaneous stabilization of three systems, which generalize similar results for systems by coprime factorization (CF). Finally, when the bicoprime factorization for the plant and controller has additive perturbations, we derive sufficient conditions using the norm inequality for robust stability of the system.     

计及用户参与不确定性的虚拟电厂分布鲁棒优化模型

灵活资源的需求响应行为在不同运行状态、激励水平下有很大的不确定性和差异性,需求响应优化方案的精准度有待进一步提高。针对这一问题,提出了一种虚拟电厂中计及用户需求响应不确定性的分布鲁棒优化方法。考虑可中断、可转移、可增长3种灵活资源的响应特性,构建包含用户响应特征参数的精细化需求响应模型;以提升虚拟电厂经济性、电网友好性和用户舒适性为子目标,构建促进多方利益最大化的多目标优化模型;基于数据驱动的分布鲁棒方法,构建精细化响应模型中随机参数的概率分布模糊集,提出虚拟电厂两阶段分布鲁棒优化模型,并采用强对偶理论进行转化求解。算例仿真结果表明所提模型能够提高需求响应精度和虚拟电厂经济收益。     

Topology optimization of continuum structures subjected to uncertainties in material properties

This work addresses the use of the topology optimization approach to the design of robust continuum structures under the hypothesis of uncertainties with known second‐order statistics. To this end, the second‐order perturbation approach is used to model the response of the structure, and the midpoint discretization technique is used to discretize the random field. The objective function is a weighted sum of the expected compliance and its standard deviation. The optimization problem is solved using a traditional optimality criteria method. It is shown that the correlation length plays an important role in the obtained topology and statistical moments when only the minimization of the standard deviation is considered, resulting in more and thinner reinforcements as the correlation length decreases. It is also shown that the minimization of the expected value is close to the minimization of the deterministic compliance for small variations of Young's modulus. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Achieving robust design through statistical effect screening

This work proposes a method for statistical effect screening to identify design parameters of a numerical simulation that are influential to performance while simultaneously being robust to epistemic uncertainty introduced by calibration variables. Design parameters are controlled by the analyst, but the optimal design is often uncertain, while calibration variables are introduced by modeling choices. We argue that uncertainty introduced by design parameters and calibration variables should be treated differently, despite potential interactions between the two sets. Herein, a robustness criterion is embedded in our effect screening to guarantee the influence of design parameters, irrespective of values used for calibration variables. The Morris screening method is utilized to explore the design space, while robustness to uncertainty is quantified in the context of info‐gap decision theory. The proposed method is applied to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Multidisciplinary Uncertainty Quantification Challenge Problem, which is a black‐box code for aeronautic flight guidance that requires 35 input parameters. The application demonstrates that a large number of variables can be handled without formulating simplifying assumptions about the potential coupling between calibration variables and design parameters. Because of the computational efficiency of the Morris screening method, we conclude that the analysis can be applied to even larger‐dimensional problems. (Approved for unlimited, public release on October 9, 2013, LA‐UR‐13‐27839, Unclassified.) Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Optimization of correlated multi-response quality engineering by the upside-down normal loss function

Most of the published literature on robust design is basically concerned with a single response. However, the reality is that common industrial problems usually involve several quality characteristics, which are often correlated. Traditional approaches to multidimensional quality do not offer much information on how much better or worse a process is when finding optimal settings. Köksoy and Fan [Engineering Optimization 44 (8): 935–945] pointed out that the upside-down normal loss function provides a more reasonable risk assessment to the losses of being off-target in product engineering research. However, they only consider the single-response case. This article generalizes their idea to more than one response under possible correlations and co-movement effects of responses on the process loss. The response surface methodology has been adapted, estimating the expected multivariate upside-down normal loss function of a multidimensional system to find the optimal control factor settings of a given problem. The procedure and its merits are illustrated through an example.     

Robust scheduling for multi-objective flexible job-shop problems with flexible workdays

This study determines a robust schedule for a flexible job-shop scheduling problem with flexible workdays. The performance criteria considered in this study are tardiness, overtime and robustness. Furthermore, the problem is addressed in a Pareto manner, and a set of Pareto-optimal solutions is determined for this purpose. In consideration of all the aforementioned features, a goal-guided neighbourhood function is proposed based on efficient problem-dependent move-filtering methods. Two metaheuristic algorithms, named goal-guided multi-objective tabu search and goal-guided multi-objective hybrid search, are proposed in this work based on this neighbourhood function. The effectiveness of these approaches is demonstrated via empirical studies.     

对无临近点信息干涉条纹的参数估计

用广义radon变换可以从运动目标产生的干涉条纹中估计出目标的运动参数和波导不变量。但是当干涉条纹中没有出现临近点时,用此方法估计不出真实值。为了解决此问题,提出了一种新的估计方法。主要过程是先从时频图中提取出干涉条纹轨迹,再去搜索与此轨迹误差最小的最优曲线,此曲线的参数值代表目标的运动参数和波导不变量。仿真和海试结果表明,在干涉条纹无临近点信息情况下,用广义radon变换估计的参数值与真实值偏差很大,但是文中提出的方法仍能估计出较准确的结果。     

Vibration data-driven machine learning architecture for structural health monitoring of steel frame structures

A vibration data-based machine learning architecture is designed for structural health monitoring (SHM) of a steel plane frame structure. This architecture uses a Bag-of-Features algorithm that extracts the speeded-up robust features (SURF) from the time-frequency scalogram images of the registered vibration data. The discriminative image features are then quantised to a visual vocabulary using K-means clustering. Finally, a support vector machine (SVM) is trained to distinguish the undamaged and multiple damage cases of the frame structure based on the discriminative features. The potential of the machine learning architecture is tested for an unseen dataset that was not used in training as well as with some datasets from entirely new damages close to existing (i.e., trained) damage classes. The results are then compared with those obtained using three other combinations of features and learning algorithms—(i) histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) feature with SVM, (ii) SURF feature with k-nearest neighbours (KNN) and (iii) HOG feature with KNN. In order to examine the robustness of the approach, the study is further extended by considering environmental variabilities along with the localisation and quantification of damage. The experimental results show that the machine learning architecture can effectively classify the undamaged and different joint damage classes with high testing accuracy that indicates its SHM potential for such frame structures.